"Lean In" is a terrible title for her book. It's as weakly euphemistic as "reach out," the touchy-feely synonym for "ask" that sounds urgent only when belted out by the Four Tops. "Lean In" also signals an effort at branding from a woman whose proselytizing is ready for a campaign trail. And it's too dainty to convey what Ms. Sandberg really means: Stand up. Step forward. Speak out. Be smart and strong, and don't torpedo your own efforts in the workplace. That's the assertiveness for which "Lean In" is a landmark manifesto.

Writing this book was gutsy, especially for someone who was prophetic about how it would be received. "Everyone loves a fight — and they really love a catfight," she writes. "The media will report endlessly about women attacking other women, which distracts from the real issues. When arguments turn into 'she said/she said,' we all lose." The pre-publication flap over "Lean In" fits exactly those specifications.

Should some of Ms. Sandberg's most outraged critics care to know what her book actually says, it's an expansion on some of her public statements. She has used a TED talk, a Barnard College commencement speech and a 2011 appearance at Harvard Business School to sound an alarm. At Harvard she bluntly told the audience, "If current trends continue, 15 years from today about one-third of the women in this audience will be working full time, and almost all of you will be working for the guy you are sitting next to."

"Lean In" offers many examples of how women undercut their career potential. In a book that is sometimes personal but should have been much more so, Ms. Sandberg describes her own way of handling that Facebook job offer: She was willing to accept whatever terms its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, proposed, until her brother-in-law told her that no man would ever take the first deal.

Ms. Sandberg has led such a charmed professional life that Mr. Zuckerberg did not allow her to refuse him; he made a better offer. And her extremely accommodating husband, Dave Goldberg, gave up his job in Los Angeles so that his wife could further her career in Menlo Park, Calif. He then became a chief executive in Portland, Ore., before moving the company headquarters to the Bay Area to be close to Ms. Sandberg and fully to share parental responsibility for their children.

How applicable is Ms. Sandberg's life in the stratosphere to those of working women on earth? More so than her book's naysayers expected. She identifies a passivity in women that, for instance, makes them reluctant to boast about their own achievements but happy to praise one another's. She advises against waiting for a mentor, "the professional equivalent of waiting for Prince Charming," and excoriates the way mentoring is misunderstood. "We need to stop telling them, 'Get a mentor and you will excel,' " she says of less experienced women. "Instead we need to tell them, 'Excel and you will get a mentor.' " Like a lot of what "Lean In" says, this thought is common-sensical but too infrequently heard.

It would be easier to benefit from Ms. Sandberg's advice if she made herself fully known to her readers. But at the personal level "Lean In" is a mass of contradictions. She describes herself as fearful and tearful, "the kid who got picked last in gym" and the one who had her "most likely to succeed" title yanked out of her yearbook, thinking it would make her unpopular. She describes moments of knee-rattling self-doubt. She cites data indicating that men ascribe their success to drive and ability, while women are apt to mention luck, hard work and help. In a book that has its share of specious research citations she also notes that men are more apt than women to drown.

But there is a Sheryl Sandberg who isn't so meek. And that Sheryl is seen here only fleetingly. Yes, she admits, as a kid she used to make her younger siblings listen to her speeches and then scream, "Right!" in conclusion. There's a Sheryl who wields great authority over large numbers of employees, who risks being overbearing at meetings ("In order for me to speak the right amount in a meeting, I have to feel as if I am saying very little"), who has "a tendency to get impatient about unresolved situations" and who runs a tight ship. But what exactly does this C.O.O. do? She says little about her Facebook role and makes only a glancing, barbed reference to Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the Google founders.

But "Lean In" will be an influential book. It will open the eyes of women who grew up thinking that feminism was ancient history, who recoil at the word but walk heedlessly through the doors it opened. And it will encourage those women to persevere in their professional lives, even if Ms. Sandberg's own domestic and career balance sounds like something out of a fairy tale.

"I am fully aware that most women are not focused on changing social norms for the next generation but simply trying to get through each day," she writes. No, most women do not have Ms. Sandberg's choices. But the most important choice she made with "Lean In" was deciding to write it. Although its author lives a life of great privilege, "Lean In" treats speaking out as the greatest luxury of all.

The law was passed by the newly Republican-controlled legislature over the veto of Gov. Mike Beebe, a Democrat, who called it "blatantly unconstitutional." On Tuesday the state Senate voted to override his veto by a vote of 20 to 14; on Wednesday the House enacted the bill into law by a vote of 55 to 33, with several Democrats joining the Republican majority.

The law contradicts the limit established by Supreme Court decisions, which give women a right to an abortion until the fetus is viable outside the womb, usually around 24 weeks into pregnancy, and abortion rights groups promised a quick lawsuit to block it.

Adoption of the law, called the "Human Heartbeat Protection Act," is the first statewide victory for a restless emerging faction within the anti-abortion movement that has lost patience with the incremental whittling away at abortion rights — the strategy of established groups like National Right to Life and the Catholic Church while they wait for a more sympathetic Supreme Court.

"When is enough enough?" asked the bill's sponsor in the legislature, Senator Jason Rapert, a 40-year-old Republican and conservative Christian, who compared the more than 50 million abortions in the United States since Roe v. Wade, in 1973, to the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. "It's time to take a stand."

But abortion rights groups and many legal experts, including some in the anti-abortion movement, say the law so sharply contradicts existing constitutional doctrine that it will quickly be voided.

"The 12-week ban actually bars abortion within the first trimester," said Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights in New York. "It has no chance of surviving a court challenge."

The center and the American Civil Liberties Union have vowed to swiftly bring a case in federal court, aiming to head off the law before it takes effect 90 days after the legislature disbands in the next month or so.

Traditional anti-abortion leaders have opposed or remained neutral on more sweeping proposals — unsuccessful until this week — to adopt early bans on abortion by declaring fertilized eggs to have the legal rights of a person, or to bar the procedure when a fetal heartbeat is detected, the inspiration for the Arkansas law.

At the same time, the strategy of incrementally narrowing abortion rights has proved successful, especially since 2010, when Republicans gained control of many more states. Measures have been adopted by the dozens in the past few years include waiting periods, parental consent for minors, ultrasound requirements and stringent regulations aimed at clinics.

In Mississippi, a rule requiring doctors performing abortions to have visiting privileges at local hospitals threatens to close down the state's only remaining abortion clinic, which relies on traveling doctors. A court decision on the measure is expected any day.

In a less brazen challenge to existing law than Arkansas's newest measure, 10 states have pushed time limits for abortions down to 20 weeks into pregnancy on the theory, disputed by most medical experts, that a fetus can feel pain by then. Such laws have wider support in the anti-abortion movement. Arkansas adopted a 20-week ban over the governor's veto last week, and most who supported it went on to vote for Mr. Rapert's more stringent bill as well.

The 20-week laws also violate the existing standard of fetal viability, and in two states are under legal challenge. Few abortions take place that late in pregnancy, and often they are for emergency medical reasons that may be permitted in any case.

By contrast, a 12-week ban would affect an estimated 12 percent of abortions nationwide, said Elizabeth Nash, state issues manager with the Guttmacher Institute, a research group in Washington that supports abortion rights. In Arkansas in 2011, 4,033 abortions were performed; 676 of them, or 17 percent, were after 12 weeks, according to state data. How many of these later procedures involved medical emergencies or cases of rape or incest — exceptions allowed under the new law — is not known.

The state currently has only one clinic, in Little Rock, that performs surgical abortions; a second, run by Planned Parenthood, only offers medicinal abortions, which are done only within the first eight weeks of pregnancy.

Senator Rapert, who cited the strong support for his bill from conservative evangelical groups like the Arkansas Family Council, hopes the Arkansas law will start a groundswell. "We crafted a bill that apparently has the ability to stand the test in courts and change abortion policy in our nation coast to coast, he said in an interview this week.

But so far, more radical measures elsewhere have fallen flat. In Mississippi a so-called personhood amendment lost at the polls, while in Ohio, a "fetal heartbeat" bill resembling that in Arkansas was defeated in the legislature, in part because it was opposed by one of the state's leading anti-abortion groups, Ohio Right to Life.

These proposals have faced deep skepticism or outright opposition from many traditional anti-abortion leaders who disagree with the strategy of directly challenging the time limit set by the Supreme Court at this time.

"As much as we would like to protect the unborn at that point, it is futile and it won't save any babies," said James Bopp Jr., a prominent anti-abortion lawyer, of the Arkansas law. Mr. Bopp, who lives in Indiana, is general counsel of National Right to Life.

He said that lower courts are virtually certain to affirm existing Supreme Court rulings, and he predicted that the Supreme Court is very unlikely to agree to hear such a case.

Mr. Rapert originally proposed setting the Arkansas ban even earlier, about six weeks after a woman's last menstrual period. But the nascent fetal heartbeat, at that point, can be detected only by using intrusive technology like a trans-vaginal ultrasound.

Wary of the national firestorm that erupted last year after Virginia tried to require an intrusive procedure, Mr. Rapert and his allies revised the bill to specify that a fetal heartbeat should be detected by abdominal ultrasound or other external methods, which is not feasible at six weeks.

In recent days, anticipating Thursday's vote, House leaders worked to make sure that Republican members would be in the chamber for the vote and to persuade some Democratic members to cross the aisle. Last weekend, a number of Democrats "got worked over" by constituents who support stringent anti-abortion measures, said Representative Greg Leding, 27, a Democrat and House minority leader.

"Some represent rural districts that are absolutely opposed to reproductive rights," he said. "There's no reaching them."

Abortion rights groups have watched the legislation with chagrin.

"It sets Arkansas back several decades in the eyes of the nation and the world," said Rita Sklar, director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas. " It shows an utter disregard for women and their ability to make important personal decisions about their own reproductive health."

But how do you do that? Microsoft Word is already a word processor, a Web design program, a database and a floor wax. What on earth is left to add?

For the last few versions, Microsoft has mostly just shuffled around the existing features. Reorganizing them into a Ribbon toolbar to make them easier to find, for example, or brightening the background for a cleaner look.

This year, the biggest news isn't the software, but how you pay for it.

Way 1: buy the Office suite as you always have, for $140 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote) to $400 (those programs plus Outlook, Access and Publisher).

Way 2: buy an annual subscription to these programs for $100 a year. That plan is called Office 365. (That's right: the programs known for a year as Office 15 are sold as Office 2013, and available through Office 365. Nobody ever accused Microsoft of clarity in naming.)

Microsoft argues that this subscription offers all kinds of benefits. First, you can download and run the Office programs on up to five computers, including Macs and PCs. You can change which five they are at any time. (Windows PCs get Office 2013, with settings magically synced across computers. Macs get the older, less refined Office 2011 for Mac.)

If your home or office has a bunch of computers, you could save money; buying five copies outright would set you back $700. That's more economical only if you plan to use that increasingly ancient version for at least seven years.

With a subscription, you'll always get the latest version — Office 2015, Office 2031, Office 2119 — but, of course, you have to pay $100 a year forever. (If your subscription lapses, you can open or print your documents, but you can't edit them or create new ones.)

You might be appalled at the notion of paying Microsoft an annual fee forever to get something you used to own outright. Or might like the idea of a fixed, knowable fee that keeps you up to date.

Either way, an Office 365 subscription gets you more than just five copies of the software. It also includes Office on Demand, which is the ability to download Office programs onto any Windows 7 or Windows 8 computer — at a branch office or a friend's house, say. Touch up your slides, write up that proposal; when you log out, the downloaded Office software vanishes.

The SkyDrive is a free 7-gigabyte online storage disk for files that you want to access from anywhere, from any computer, tablet or smartphone with an Internet connection. In Office 13, it's more important; in fact, the factory setting is to save new documents onto your SkyDrive. And if you subscribe to Office 365, you get another 20 gigabytes. That's a lot of slides and spreadsheets.

Even that isn't the end of the pot-sweetening. The same $100 fee also buys you one hour a month of free Skype-to-phone calls. (Microsoft bought Skype last year.) That is, from a computer, tablet or phone that has Skype installed, you can call to regular landline or cellphone numbers — something that usually costs a few cents a minute. (Calls to computers and smartphones, using Skype addresses, like Skibunny20304, are still free.)

So far, it must sound as if the only thing new in Office 2013 is how you pay for it. But there are also plenty of nips and tucks to the software itself.

The programs have a new design that matches the clean, rectangular lines of Windows 8's Start screen. No drop shadows, shaded toolbars or rounded corners on buttons or boxes.

Speaking of touch screens — and Microsoft has been speaking of them incessantly lately — a new Touch Mode is supposed to spread out Office's buttons and menu items, so that you can more easily hit them with a finger. It's not much spreading, though. You'll still wish you had a mouse.

Each Office program now has a new File-menu "experience," which is Microsoft's goofy word for "screen." When you select one of the File menu's commands — Open, Save, Print, Share and so on —  that File menu stays open, and the corresponding options for printing, saving or sharing appear in the main part of the window. It's a good idea; it feels like fewer steps. (Only the Options command violates the consistency; it opens the usual preferences dialogue box.)

There's animation, too. The insertion-point cursor seems to glide along as you type; highlighting seems to flow from one Excel cell to another. In PowerPoint, your slides change in real time as you point to different design templates (before you actually click); Excel does the same as you browse chart types.

Microsoft has also created an app store for Office. Most of the software bits here are free; for example, you can add new chart styles to Excel, Twitter feeds to Outlook or language translation dictionaries to Word. It's a sparse but intriguing catalog.

Each individual program has some new goodies, too. For example, Word can, after a moment of processing, open and save PDF documents. That's genuinely useful, but it doesn't work consistently. Some PDF documents open only as un-editable graphics — not as text — and some layouts shift quite a bit when converted to Word's format.

Whenever you open a document, a little clickable balloon offers to take you to the spot where you stopped last time, even it was on another device; very slick. There's also a Reading Mode, which lends any document a handsome, e-booklike layout.

In Excel, when you highlight some cells, a tiny tab button appears below and to the right. Click it to open a pop-up palette of relevant options: charting, formatting, totals and so on. Yes, these options are also on the Ribbon — but as you point to these, the formatting of your selected cells changes in real time. That way, you can try on the formatting without committing to anything.

PowerPoint's upgrades are similarly minor but welcome. For example, you can now snag a photo directly from your online Flickr or Facebook account, without having to download and save it first. And music that starts on one slide can now continue playing even as you move onto other slides.

In Outlook, the touch-ups include "inline replies": when you click Reply, you can type your response above the original message, without opening a new window. You can take a peek at your correspondents' Facebook or LinkedIn posts right there beneath their messages. The calendar now displays the weather for the next few days, so you'll know what to wear or pack. And you can now set up Hotmail and other Web-based e-mail accounts without needing add-on "connector" plug-ins.

Office is still enormous, complex and sprawling. It's still about 47,000 times more software than anybody really needs. And you can still manage perfectly well without it; Google and OpenOffice.org still offer free equivalents of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. They're not anywhere near as refined or feature-packed as Office 2013, but they get the job done, and they make collaboration easy.

As for the subscription concept, it's no slam-dunk. It will appeal to some, turn off others.

Fortunately, you'll soon find out where you stand; you can try Office 365, including downloading Office onto five Macs or PCs, for a month at no charge. You may find that the $100-a-year offer makes the Office value proposition even muddier than it was before — but you'll find the 2013 programs themselves to be speedy, attractive and very polished.

Mr. Kelly said the friend, Derrick Hamilton, had spoken with members of the Police Department and said he was acting as a liaison for the suspect, Julio Acevedo, 44. Since Monday, Mr. Acevedo has repeatedly indicated that he intended to surrender, but has not done so.

"We don't know if this is a game or what," Mr. Kelly said at a news briefing at Police Headquarters. "We are actively looking for him; we are not waiting for him to turn himself in."

The police have said Mr. Acevedo was the driver of a BMW that plowed into the side of a livery cab on Sunday just after midnight, killing a young expecting couple, Raizy and Nathan Glauber, who were riding inside. After the crash, their son was delivered three months premature; he died the next day.

In a phone interview on Wednesday, Mr. Hamilton said Mr. Acevedo would go with a lawyer to turn himself in. "He's surrendering today. Sometime after 3 p.m.," he said. "It will be done today, for sure."

As the police awaited word on a time and location for Mr. Acevedo to appear, a spokesman for the Bronx district attorney said prosecutors did not have enough evidence to pursue a case against the owner of the BMW, a Bronx woman arrested on Sunday on charges of insurance fraud. The spokesman, Steven Reed, said the prosecution had been deferred pending further police investigation.